Maybe those people that I elect and pay shouldn't be on vacation while I'm looking for second job so I can pay for the gas to get to my first job!
If you really want your elected representatives to spend all of their time in DC, I'm sure some of them would be perfectly fine with that. Sure, you can call being out of session and returning to the districts they actually represent a 'vacation'... but most of the time, I wouldn't.
I expect my representative to stay where there is work to be done. Today, that is in Washington.
What a dumb thing to say, and absolutely opposite of your stated political opinion. Please, state for the record that you wish congress to enact more laws. I really wish I could see your face right now, because I know you are gritting your teeth and frothing at the mouth due to cognitive dissonance.
You really think that passing more laws is going to fix this? REALLY? You think congress should cancel their regularly scheduled vacation so they can pass more laws? I do not for a second believe that you really mean that.
You are absolutely correct. I want congress to REPEAL laws they put in effect many years ago that is causing me to go broke trying to drive to work.
Here is a question, what car do you drive? And how much efficiency is in your house?
My house is energy star approved. Not that it matters since my house is not powered by fossil fuels. I'm also certain that yours is not powered by oil.
For crying out loud... Do you REALLY think drilling is going to solve anything? This is called historical revisionism.
The reality is that oil and fuel would have gone up some time. Of course we can debate till the cows come home on when that would have been, but that would have come. And you would have said the same thing regarding the price of oil.
Here is a question, what car do you drive? And how much efficiency is in your house? Three years ago I traded in my 6 cylinder car for a 4 cylinder turbo charged because I had an inkling that oil would go up. I am glad that I did...
The name of the game is efficiency... Sadly most North American's thought it was cool to drive gas guzzlers...
And before you say, "I have a right." My response is, "sure you do, but you also have the right to pay through the nose..."
I agree, efficiency is a key component of any future energy policy. But that is only half the story. The other half of the supply and demand equation is SUPPLY. Read THIS for a review. Then go smack your economics teacher for teaching you the most basic LAW of economics.
BTW, I drive a four cylinder car. I did before gas prices went through the roof.
You mean a trillion barrels of oil won't make a drop in the sea's worth of real change and call it an "Energy Policy".
You're clearly not reading the same EIA reports the rest of us are. The delta appears to be about 0.2% of world supply.
There is more than just the Continental Outer Shelf that needs to be explored:
ANWR: 10 billion barrels Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned) Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels
Also, according to the link you provided:
Although existing moratoria on leasing in the OCS will expire in 2012, the AEO2007 reference case assumes that they will be reinstated, as they have in the past. Current restrictions are therefore assumed to prevail for the remainder of the projection period, with no exploration or development allowed in areas currently unavailable to leasing.
The whole point of the debate was to remove those restrictions, which would render the entire report you linked to obsolete.
Speculators aren't idiots and know exactly how little oil is in the US reserves. Which still doesn't explain the sneaky and underhanded antics of the conservatives. Having the lights turned out on them is exactly what they deserve, they shouldn't try to sneak in and enact legislation while everyone is on vacation.
Maybe those people that I elect and pay shouldn't be on vacation while I'm looking for second job so I can pay for the gas to get to my first job!
Save that it wasn't the liberals that were doing this silly stunt...it's the ones that claim to be conservatives. The House adjourned for vacation. The Republican's chose to act like little kids and try to press for oil drilling that won't make a drop in the sea's worth of real change and call it an "Energy Policy".
Shameful, really.
You mean a trillion barrels of oil won't make a drop in the sea's worth of real change and call it an "Energy Policy".
I want what you are smoking.
In the mean time, I can't afford to buy my little girl new shoes because ass-hats like yourself prefer to do nothing while the cost of gasoline and diesel goes through the roof, driving up the prices of everything.
If anyone can come up with a better explanation I'd be interested to hear it.
TFA offers the following:
At the very least, this suggests some incredibly sloppy coding on Futuremark's part, as the company may be enabling or disabling CPU optimizations based on a processor's vendor name in CPUID instead of actually checking CPUID for SIMD support. In this case, PCMark 2005's memory subsystem test doesn't appear to be aware that Nano supports SSE2 and SSE3, and is instead running a decidedly less-optimized code path. There are two factors, however, that make this explanation a bit difficult to swallow.
First, there's the issue of timing. PCMark 2005 was released (obviously) in 2005, and was obviously coded with an eye towards supporting current and future processors. This is standard operating procedure for Futuremark, which always builds benchmarks designed to last for at least a year, and often two. VIA's C5N-T (Nehemiah) core may have only supported MMX and 3DNow!, but the C7 launched in 2005, and that processor supported SSE2 and SSE3 from day one. Even if proper extension support wasn't built into the first version of PCM2K5, we tested version 1.2.0, and that patch was released on or around 11-29-2006.
Second, there's the issue of performance when Nano is identified as AuthenticAMD. If performance between the AMD and Intel CPUIDs was identical, there wouldn't really be a story here, but it isn't, and that's curious. Futuremark could plausibly argue that VIA's C3/C7 processors weren't exactly on the radar back in 2004-2005, but AMD and K8 certainly were, and K8 launched with full SSE and SSE2 support, with SSE3 added in 2005.
There's more, but I don't want to quote the entire article.
"where all our jobs are within 5 minutes of our homes." There is such a place, they even have effective public transportation. I hear it is called "Western Europe"
I also hear that they pay through the nose in taxes. Take Austria for example. they pay a 25% corporate rate (which means all prices are 25% higher than they need to be), a 50% personal income tax and a 20% VAT. Now, what does that mean? Let's say candy bars are $1.00 (or whatever currency you follow). If you make $20/hr, you can afford about 15 candy bars an hour in the US (after taxes). In Austria, that same candy bar will cost you $1.45 and you only get $10/hr to buy them with (after taxes), meaning that you will only be able to buy 6 candy bars per hour. Given this, you see that this public transportation system cuts Austrians buying power in half. Here in the US, we don't spend half our income on transportation.
Ok, well, I am not from Texas, so I don't know the climate but I assume it is comfortable for biking at least some portions of the year, right?
Let's assume it is real bad and you can bike only 20% of the time.
That still represents a great deal of gas (aka petrol) that you could save along with the associated carbon emissions.
Also, you would be much healthier.
]{
PS. The idea of my wife 'hosing me down' after work is somewhat appealing but to each his own.;-)
If I could, I would. But work is more than 30 miles from home. Before you say I should live closer to work, understand that when I purchased the house, my job was less than seven miles away. I worked there for seven years, but it was time to move on. The only other job that I could find that paid as much or more was 30 miles away. When I can sell my home for more than I owe, I'll probably move. Until then, I'm not Lance Armstrong (THE local hero from the Austin area), so the idea of riding a bike 70 miles a day does not appeal to me.
If I could bike to work, I probably would, especially since nearly all of our entertainment money has gone into my gas tank and has left us with absolutely no disposable cash for emergencies (and yes, I do drive a fuel efficient vehicle).
I hate to say it, but I'm now one of those people that wish everyone else would ride to work, or at least the ones that can.
Actually you can bike a lot further then you think. In addition it's not a waste of time in places with traffic congestion and you can travel faster by going a constant 15 mph as opposed to a stop and go 25mph. The roads would still exist obviously for an infinite amount of reasons but bike pathways and then offshoots of those pathways into may places of business would ease traffic and promote health and limit pollution.
Can you ride 30 miles to work in Texas without smelling so much like ass that you boss has to ask you to go home? Then, of course, ride 30 miles home where your wife has to hose you off before letting you in the house?
Oh, and then there is the rain, occasional ice, cold wind and so on that tends to inhibit normal people from riding bikes to work. Did I mention the hills? Lance Armstrong is from around here, ya know. Guess where he learned to ride up Mountains?
Of course, then we have to worry about how much stuff we can pack for the trip. First, we need a change of clothes so we don't smell like ass. Of course, we can't let them get wrinkled. Next, we need a towel to dry off with after we shower (assuming we have a shower at work). Of course, we'll need soap and shampoo to wash the sweat off. This doesn't include a notebook or briefcase that is required for work.
Now, of course, if we all lived downtown, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, because so many people want to live downtown so they can feel smug about riding their bikes to work that it has driven up the price of homes within bike distance of the jobs so much that it costs way too much for way too little living space. Sorry, but I don't make half a million a year, so I can't afford to live downtown.
So, forgive me if it seems as if I'm coming down on you. It's not just you, but everyone else who tells me how I too could ride my bike to work. But seriously, please, don't give that crap about how wonderful it is to live in a Utopian society where all our jobs are within 5 minutes of our homes. That's only the case in Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movies and does not reflect reality. Also, don't get me wrong, I would love it more people rode bikes to work. That would free up the free ways so I could get to work in less than an hour. Of course, if that were the case, all the freeways would still be jammed they would all be one lane government works.
When the latest Ubuntu was released and my ISP was slowing BitTorrent to a crawl, where did I turn? Newsgroups
Wouldn't it have been faster to just find an http and/or ftp mirror and download it that way instead of downloading an encoded copy off Usenet that was probably 30-40% larger than the actual files?
Quite frankly, no. When the latest LinuxMint came out, it was available via BitTorrent only. There were no FTP or HTTP sources. Same with Sabayon and many other of the smaller distro's. They simply can not afford to host these files themselves. Sure, a few users volunteer their servers, but those are so overwhelmed within 15 minutes of the announcement that they are worthless.
"Child-porn investigations have doomed one of the last remnants of a smaller, kinder Net."
Can some one please tell me what investigations have doomed Usenet and how?
The Attorney General of NY started pushing on ISP's like Time Warner and AT&T to filter/moderate alt.* groups and/or hand over the names of the posters. Time Warner dropped alt.* altogether and the pressure is building for the rest to do the same.
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
Frankly, that's the only one I care about. Sure, there is TONS of porn, but there are also respectable (non porn) files out there as well. When my wife missed an episode of "Dancing With the Stars" a while back, where did I find a copy? Newsgroups. When the latest Ubuntu was released and my ISP was slowing BitTorrent to a crawl, where did I turn? Newsgroups. When I wanted some ideas for how to set up my garden, where did I turn to? You guessed it, Newsgroups!
There are some things that no Web site can offer that you can only find on Usenet. That stupid Dancing with the Stars thing is an example. It was not available on any website because it is protected (even though there was absolutely no other way of retrieving it). With ISP's starting to block P2P, we should always be able to fall back on good ol' usenet.
Which brings me to the point you mentioned about spammers. Spammers are relatively easy to avoid on Usenet. The bigger problem is spyware, viruses and trojans. However, the beauty of Usenet is that someone can reply to a post with bad intent and say something like, "Do not download! VIRUS!!!" You can't do that on a non reputable or hijacked website. All you can do is hope that the file you downloaded really is the XP drivers for a new "Vista Only" system and not a virus that will zap your HDD.
That's all fine and good, but as I said, we could be talking about thousands of phone calls to and from thousands of sources. Can that single judge across the hall grant that many warrants for calls that produced nothing? What would the debate be if it got out that the FISA court issues 10000 warrants a day that led to one possible lead a month?
I have a feeling that the DHS doesn't have a clue as to which lines to tap and which ones to leave alone so they are casting a much wider net than would otherwise be necessary. In data-mining cases like this, I don't think that a FISA judge would be of any help. Now I agree that we need oversight, but FISA is not up to the task for the type of wide net that is required.
My opinion is this: this administration has executed one of the most egregious power grabs in recent executive branch history, and ignoring FISA was just another blatant attempt at consolidating that power. I doubt there is any justification for it, I suspect they simply did it as a snub to the court and Congress because they knew they'd get away with it.
Of course, you are entitled to your opinion. I don't see it that way, however. It is WAY too risky to just tap phones willie nillie just to snub the courts and congress. There has to be a good reason for it. I just don't see a president and his staff risking impeachment/prosecution and jail time just to thumb their noses at congress and the courts. It would be much less risky to simply do a drive-by mooning or paper Pelosi's house if that were their goal. It just doesn't make sense to risk your career and freedom just to try to prove that you are above the law. And with Congress approving the latest telecom bill, I assume that many of them were let in on the secret. I can't think of another good reason why someone with so much to lose as Obama voting for immunity.
Who knows. Maybe someone thinks there is a spy working at the FISA courts. Maybe the DHS is so incompetent that they have no idea what they are looking for so they have to cast an extremely wide net and don't want to tip off our enemies how clueless we are. Maybe wiretapping doesn't work and this is all a smoke screen to make our enemies THINK we are listening in.
Since neither of us know for sure, we are limited to form uneducated opinions and/or conspiracy theories like this. Maybe one day we'll learn what it is really all about. Until then, all we can do is bitch and speculate.
Furthermore, I do not hold national security in "such a low regard". I asked for evidence that national security objectives were achieved rather than empty statements that it was being pursued in some non-specific way.
Sorry, but when you said:
My standards of proof are higher than just taking mush-mouthed claims of "national security" to heart and walking away.
... It led me to believe that you consider "national security" on par with the argument of "think of the children". Sorry if I misunderstood your meaning.
And, as a footnote to all this, we haven't even touched on one crucial component of the argument: what was wrong with the existing FISA provisions anyway?
This is copied and pasted from another post of mine. A call comes in from Pakistan from an unknown number. It's a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC. Another call comes in from London to the same number. Another call comes in from Iran to that number. How do you know if it's tap-worthy? There's way of knowing unless listen in. You listen in and find out that it's just someone talking with relatives scattered all over the globe because grandma just died in Afghanistan. No threat, so you stop listening. Do you get a warrant now because you listened in? There are thousands of calls that come in like this every single day, most of which are harmless but some are not. Do you get a warrant for each and every one? Or do you "data-mine" the calls and only get warrants on those that could constitute a threat? I feel that a warrant should not be required at the data-mining stage, but every stage thereafter.
I oppose excessive government powers of any stripe, and if secretly wiretapping citizens and refusing to allow any meaningful oversight isn't an excessive power, I don't know what is.
OK, tapping calls that originate and terminate within the US would be "excessive" IMHO. Tapping calls that have at least one end in a foreign country is not out of bounds as the fourth does not apply to foreign phones.
Of course, if they were to continually tap a couple having "hot-chat" conversations coming out of a business trip to Paris, then we could have an issue here. If they start tapping a presidential candidate's phone calls from over seas to his campaign manager and sharing that info with his opponent, then we'd have a problem. If they start tapping calls looking for a drug smuggler, someone trying to export around tariffs or looking for politicians hiring prostitutes from Canada, then we'd have a problem. The problem is that we have no way of knowing if the call was tapped for "national security" reasons or not.
So, I agree that some oversight is needed to prevent abuse, but the FISA court was not designed to handle that. I'm sure we can agree that something needs to be designed to handle this, without compromising national security, state secrets, or individual rights.
Any conversation with anyone outside the US can be intercepted, not just the ones that originate overseas or are from known or suspected terrorist organizations. If Grandma is in London, England, or even London, Ontario, the conversation can now be legally listened to. Also, the FISA courts were set up as a rubber stamp. IIRC, there's a special room at the NSA where a federal judge does nothing but grant warrants for FISA wiretaps. The whole process takes about five minutes, and the warrant was retroactive for a few days so that nothing important would be missed. The current administration felt that this was too restrictive, so they just stopped following the law.
With disposable phones so prevalent now, how do you know which call to listen in on? This is why the gov't can't get a warrant. If you think about how it works, you will understand. Take this hypothetical:
A call comes in from Pakistan from an unknown number. It's a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC. Another call comes in from London to the same number. Another call comes in from Iran to that number. How do you know if it's tap-worthy? There's no other option but to listen in. You listen in and find out that it's just someone talking with relatives scattered all over the globe because grandma just died. No threat, so you stop listening. Do you get a warrant now because you listened in? There are thousands of calls that come in like this every single day. Most of which are harmless. Do you get a warrant for each and every one?
You don't need a warrant to tap a foreign phone. The forth does not apply overseas.
Fine. What reason then? Cite instances where the American government has wiretapped an American citizen and either explained clearly and completely why they did it, or
My standards of proof are higher than just taking mush-mouthed claims of "national security" to heart and walking away. What credible threats were investigated and what, if any, convictions (hell, what charges even) stemmed from any of the illegal wiretapping?
Sorry if you hold "national security" to such a low regard. Do you leave your doors unlocked when you go to bed? If not, I assume it's because you value YOUR security. Why then would you be so willing play fast and loose with MY security and everyone else's around you? Sure, I'm not going to give our government unlimited power in the name of national security, but I don't really have a problem if they record a phone call coming from a cell phone in Tora Bora to a disposable phone stateside. I want them listening to every single phone call that comes from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and other hot spots around the world and I don't expect the gov't to get the thousands of warrants needed to do so. That would be impossible, especially since disposable phones make it possible to use a number once and discard of it. Do you expect the gov't to get a warrant for every call that comes in?
Since your commentary is so immature, I won't bother dignifying any response you post with further attention. I'm sure if I wanted a legitimate discussion instead of empty political theatrics, I could find it, so I don't need to bash my head on the wall with you.
You're one to talk since you keep using the phrase "illegal wiretapping". Congress has made it perfectly clear that such wiretapping is NOT illegal.
many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no reason
many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no good reason
Their was a reason for the spying. You may think it was good, most Slashdot members appear to believe that it was not a good reason, but a reason was given (after the fact). That reason being, they were spying on international calls believed to be involved in terrorism.
I'm not defending the ISP's or the Government, but the original post is misleading IMO.
I agree completely. I can think of 3000+ good reasons. Actually, that's not true because those 3000+ are dead and gone.
I can think of 300,000,000 reasons.
Don't get me wrong, there are valid complaints against the bill, but when you start out saying obvious lies like, "for no reason", you lose all credibility.
Besides, this seems like a money grab to me. They are trying to raise money to bribe...er... lobby congress people. If the telecom bill were THAT unpopular, these asshats in congress would be voted out, as that would be the "will of the people". Since they won't be, it's safe to assume that the American public either supports the telecom bill or simply doesn't care enough to make it a voting issue. So it seems to me that this group is trying to raise money to usurp the will of "We The People" in the name of the Constitution. Something is not right there.
The point of Godwins Law is that once a thread degenerates into comparisons with Hitler that thread is effectively over, and can be killfiled by the participants without risk of losing any useful information.
This leads to the tradition that mention of Nazis in a thread by a participant automatically makes them lose the argument (http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/g/GodwinsLaw.html)
What if the whole point of the article is about real world Nazis? Is there no point in reading it?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe those people that I elect and pay shouldn't be on vacation while I'm looking for second job so I can pay for the gas to get to my first job!
If you really want your elected representatives to spend all of their time in DC, I'm sure some of them would be perfectly fine with that. Sure, you can call being out of session and returning to the districts they actually represent a 'vacation'... but most of the time, I wouldn't.
I expect my representative to stay where there is work to be done. Today, that is in Washington.
What a dumb thing to say, and absolutely opposite of your stated political opinion. Please, state for the record that you wish congress to enact more laws. I really wish I could see your face right now, because I know you are gritting your teeth and frothing at the mouth due to cognitive dissonance.
You really think that passing more laws is going to fix this? REALLY? You think congress should cancel their regularly scheduled vacation so they can pass more laws? I do not for a second believe that you really mean that.
You are absolutely correct. I want congress to REPEAL laws they put in effect many years ago that is causing me to go broke trying to drive to work.
Here is a question, what car do you drive? And how much efficiency is in your house?
My house is energy star approved. Not that it matters since my house is not powered by fossil fuels. I'm also certain that yours is not powered by oil.
For crying out loud... Do you REALLY think drilling is going to solve anything? This is called historical revisionism.
The reality is that oil and fuel would have gone up some time. Of course we can debate till the cows come home on when that would have been, but that would have come. And you would have said the same thing regarding the price of oil.
Here is a question, what car do you drive? And how much efficiency is in your house? Three years ago I traded in my 6 cylinder car for a 4 cylinder turbo charged because I had an inkling that oil would go up. I am glad that I did...
The name of the game is efficiency... Sadly most North American's thought it was cool to drive gas guzzlers...
And before you say, "I have a right." My response is, "sure you do, but you also have the right to pay through the nose..."
I agree, efficiency is a key component of any future energy policy. But that is only half the story. The other half of the supply and demand equation is SUPPLY. Read THIS for a review. Then go smack your economics teacher for teaching you the most basic LAW of economics.
BTW, I drive a four cylinder car. I did before gas prices went through the roof.
You're clearly not reading the same EIA reports the rest of us are. The delta appears to be about 0.2% of world supply.
There is more than just the Continental Outer Shelf that needs to be explored:
ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels
Also, according to the link you provided:
Although existing moratoria on leasing in the OCS will expire in 2012, the AEO2007 reference case assumes that they will be reinstated, as they have in the past. Current restrictions are therefore assumed to prevail for the remainder of the projection period, with no exploration or development allowed in areas currently unavailable to leasing.
The whole point of the debate was to remove those restrictions, which would render the entire report you linked to obsolete.
It doesn't work the way you think it does.
Actually, it does.
Speculators aren't idiots and know exactly how little oil is in the US reserves. Which still doesn't explain the sneaky and underhanded antics of the conservatives. Having the lights turned out on them is exactly what they deserve, they shouldn't try to sneak in and enact legislation while everyone is on vacation.
Maybe those people that I elect and pay shouldn't be on vacation while I'm looking for second job so I can pay for the gas to get to my first job!
Save that it wasn't the liberals that were doing this silly stunt...it's the ones that claim to be conservatives. The House adjourned for vacation. The Republican's chose to act like little kids and try to press for oil drilling that won't make a drop in the sea's worth of real change and call it an "Energy Policy".
Shameful, really.
You mean a trillion barrels of oil won't make a drop in the sea's worth of real change and call it an "Energy Policy".
I want what you are smoking.
In the mean time, I can't afford to buy my little girl new shoes because ass-hats like yourself prefer to do nothing while the cost of gasoline and diesel goes through the roof, driving up the prices of everything.
Thanx a lot!
If anyone can come up with a better explanation I'd be interested to hear it.
TFA offers the following:
At the very least, this suggests some incredibly sloppy coding on Futuremark's part, as the company may be enabling or disabling CPU optimizations based on a processor's vendor name in CPUID instead of actually checking CPUID for SIMD support. In this case, PCMark 2005's memory subsystem test doesn't appear to be aware that Nano supports SSE2 and SSE3, and is instead running a decidedly less-optimized code path. There are two factors, however, that make this explanation a bit difficult to swallow.
First, there's the issue of timing. PCMark 2005 was released (obviously) in 2005, and was obviously coded with an eye towards supporting current and future processors. This is standard operating procedure for Futuremark, which always builds benchmarks designed to last for at least a year, and often two. VIA's C5N-T (Nehemiah) core may have only supported MMX and 3DNow!, but the C7 launched in 2005, and that processor supported SSE2 and SSE3 from day one. Even if proper extension support wasn't built into the first version of PCM2K5, we tested version 1.2.0, and that patch was released on or around 11-29-2006.
Second, there's the issue of performance when Nano is identified as AuthenticAMD. If performance between the AMD and Intel CPUIDs was identical, there wouldn't really be a story here, but it isn't, and that's curious. Futuremark could plausibly argue that VIA's C3/C7 processors weren't exactly on the radar back in 2004-2005, but AMD and K8 certainly were, and K8 launched with full SSE and SSE2 support, with SSE3 added in 2005.
There's more, but I don't want to quote the entire article.
"where all our jobs are within 5 minutes of our homes." There is such a place, they even have effective public transportation. I hear it is called "Western Europe"
I also hear that they pay through the nose in taxes. Take Austria for example. they pay a 25% corporate rate (which means all prices are 25% higher than they need to be), a 50% personal income tax and a 20% VAT. Now, what does that mean?
Let's say candy bars are $1.00 (or whatever currency you follow). If you make $20/hr, you can afford about 15 candy bars an hour in the US (after taxes).
In Austria, that same candy bar will cost you $1.45 and you only get $10/hr to buy them with (after taxes), meaning that you will only be able to buy 6 candy bars per hour. Given this, you see that this public transportation system cuts Austrians buying power in half. Here in the US, we don't spend half our income on transportation.
So, I say, "No thanx! I'll keep driving my car."
Ok, well, I am not from Texas, so I don't know the climate but I assume it is comfortable for biking at least some portions of the year, right?
Let's assume it is real bad and you can bike only 20% of the time.
That still represents a great deal of gas (aka petrol) that you could save along with the associated carbon emissions.
Also, you would be much healthier.
]{
PS. The idea of my wife 'hosing me down' after work is somewhat appealing but to each his own. ;-)
If I could, I would. But work is more than 30 miles from home. Before you say I should live closer to work, understand that when I purchased the house, my job was less than seven miles away. I worked there for seven years, but it was time to move on. The only other job that I could find that paid as much or more was 30 miles away. When I can sell my home for more than I owe, I'll probably move. Until then, I'm not Lance Armstrong (THE local hero from the Austin area), so the idea of riding a bike 70 miles a day does not appeal to me.
If I could bike to work, I probably would, especially since nearly all of our entertainment money has gone into my gas tank and has left us with absolutely no disposable cash for emergencies (and yes, I do drive a fuel efficient vehicle).
I hate to say it, but I'm now one of those people that wish everyone else would ride to work, or at least the ones that can.
Actually you can bike a lot further then you think. In addition it's not a waste of time in places with traffic congestion and you can travel faster by going a constant 15 mph as opposed to a stop and go 25mph. The roads would still exist obviously for an infinite amount of reasons but bike pathways and then offshoots of those pathways into may places of business would ease traffic and promote health and limit pollution.
Can you ride 30 miles to work in Texas without smelling so much like ass that you boss has to ask you to go home? Then, of course, ride 30 miles home where your wife has to hose you off before letting you in the house?
Oh, and then there is the rain, occasional ice, cold wind and so on that tends to inhibit normal people from riding bikes to work. Did I mention the hills? Lance Armstrong is from around here, ya know. Guess where he learned to ride up Mountains?
Of course, then we have to worry about how much stuff we can pack for the trip. First, we need a change of clothes so we don't smell like ass. Of course, we can't let them get wrinkled. Next, we need a towel to dry off with after we shower (assuming we have a shower at work). Of course, we'll need soap and shampoo to wash the sweat off. This doesn't include a notebook or briefcase that is required for work.
Now, of course, if we all lived downtown, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, because so many people want to live downtown so they can feel smug about riding their bikes to work that it has driven up the price of homes within bike distance of the jobs so much that it costs way too much for way too little living space. Sorry, but I don't make half a million a year, so I can't afford to live downtown.
So, forgive me if it seems as if I'm coming down on you. It's not just you, but everyone else who tells me how I too could ride my bike to work. But seriously, please, don't give that crap about how wonderful it is to live in a Utopian society where all our jobs are within 5 minutes of our homes. That's only the case in Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movies and does not reflect reality. Also, don't get me wrong, I would love it more people rode bikes to work. That would free up the free ways so I could get to work in less than an hour. Of course, if that were the case, all the freeways would still be jammed they would all be one lane government works.
When the latest Ubuntu was released and my ISP was slowing BitTorrent to a crawl, where did I turn? Newsgroups
Wouldn't it have been faster to just find an http and/or ftp mirror and download it that way instead of downloading an encoded copy off Usenet that was probably 30-40% larger than the actual files?
Quite frankly, no. When the latest LinuxMint came out, it was available via BitTorrent only. There were no FTP or HTTP sources. Same with Sabayon and many other of the smaller distro's. They simply can not afford to host these files themselves. Sure, a few users volunteer their servers, but those are so overwhelmed within 15 minutes of the announcement that they are worthless.
The only two viable options are Usenet or wait.
"Child-porn investigations have doomed one of the last remnants of a smaller, kinder Net."
Can some one please tell me what investigations have doomed Usenet and how?
The Attorney General of NY started pushing on ISP's like Time Warner and AT&T to filter/moderate alt.* groups and/or hand over the names of the posters. Time Warner dropped alt.* altogether and the pressure is building for the rest to do the same.
You are part of the problem
Where the hell else are you supposed to download Sabayon Linux or Linux Mint ISO's when your ISB has blocked bittorrent?
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
Frankly, that's the only one I care about. Sure, there is TONS of porn, but there are also respectable (non porn) files out there as well. When my wife missed an episode of "Dancing With the Stars" a while back, where did I find a copy? Newsgroups. When the latest Ubuntu was released and my ISP was slowing BitTorrent to a crawl, where did I turn? Newsgroups. When I wanted some ideas for how to set up my garden, where did I turn to? You guessed it, Newsgroups!
There are some things that no Web site can offer that you can only find on Usenet. That stupid Dancing with the Stars thing is an example. It was not available on any website because it is protected (even though there was absolutely no other way of retrieving it). With ISP's starting to block P2P, we should always be able to fall back on good ol' usenet.
Which brings me to the point you mentioned about spammers. Spammers are relatively easy to avoid on Usenet. The bigger problem is spyware, viruses and trojans. However, the beauty of Usenet is that someone can reply to a post with bad intent and say something like, "Do not download! VIRUS!!!" You can't do that on a non reputable or hijacked website. All you can do is hope that the file you downloaded really is the XP drivers for a new "Vista Only" system and not a virus that will zap your HDD.
Would "Rods from God" be considered a WMD?
How did he stay in office so long if there was already evidence of corruption in 2003 and 2004?
The same way that William Jefferson of New Orleans did (and still is).
(Who, BTW, in response to the AC that also responded to your post, is NOT white)
That's all fine and good, but as I said, we could be talking about thousands of phone calls to and from thousands of sources. Can that single judge across the hall grant that many warrants for calls that produced nothing? What would the debate be if it got out that the FISA court issues 10000 warrants a day that led to one possible lead a month?
I have a feeling that the DHS doesn't have a clue as to which lines to tap and which ones to leave alone so they are casting a much wider net than would otherwise be necessary. In data-mining cases like this, I don't think that a FISA judge would be of any help. Now I agree that we need oversight, but FISA is not up to the task for the type of wide net that is required.
My opinion is this: this administration has executed one of the most egregious power grabs in recent executive branch history, and ignoring FISA was just another blatant attempt at consolidating that power. I doubt there is any justification for it, I suspect they simply did it as a snub to the court and Congress because they knew they'd get away with it.
Of course, you are entitled to your opinion. I don't see it that way, however. It is WAY too risky to just tap phones willie nillie just to snub the courts and congress. There has to be a good reason for it. I just don't see a president and his staff risking impeachment/prosecution and jail time just to thumb their noses at congress and the courts. It would be much less risky to simply do a drive-by mooning or paper Pelosi's house if that were their goal. It just doesn't make sense to risk your career and freedom just to try to prove that you are above the law. And with Congress approving the latest telecom bill, I assume that many of them were let in on the secret. I can't think of another good reason why someone with so much to lose as Obama voting for immunity.
Who knows. Maybe someone thinks there is a spy working at the FISA courts. Maybe the DHS is so incompetent that they have no idea what they are looking for so they have to cast an extremely wide net and don't want to tip off our enemies how clueless we are. Maybe wiretapping doesn't work and this is all a smoke screen to make our enemies THINK we are listening in.
Since neither of us know for sure, we are limited to form uneducated opinions and/or conspiracy theories like this. Maybe one day we'll learn what it is really all about. Until then, all we can do is bitch and speculate.
Furthermore, I do not hold national security in "such a low regard". I asked for evidence that national security objectives were achieved rather than empty statements that it was being pursued in some non-specific way.
Sorry, but when you said:
My standards of proof are higher than just taking mush-mouthed claims of "national security" to heart and walking away.
... It led me to believe that you consider "national security" on par with the argument of "think of the children". Sorry if I misunderstood your meaning.
And, as a footnote to all this, we haven't even touched on one crucial component of the argument: what was wrong with the existing FISA provisions anyway?
This is copied and pasted from another post of mine.
A call comes in from Pakistan from an unknown number. It's a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC. Another call comes in from London to the same number. Another call comes in from Iran to that number. How do you know if it's tap-worthy? There's way of knowing unless listen in. You listen in and find out that it's just someone talking with relatives scattered all over the globe because grandma just died in Afghanistan. No threat, so you stop listening. Do you get a warrant now because you listened in? There are thousands of calls that come in like this every single day, most of which are harmless but some are not. Do you get a warrant for each and every one? Or do you "data-mine" the calls and only get warrants on those that could constitute a threat?
I feel that a warrant should not be required at the data-mining stage, but every stage thereafter.
I oppose excessive government powers of any stripe, and if secretly wiretapping citizens and refusing to allow any meaningful oversight isn't an excessive power, I don't know what is.
OK, tapping calls that originate and terminate within the US would be "excessive" IMHO. Tapping calls that have at least one end in a foreign country is not out of bounds as the fourth does not apply to foreign phones.
Of course, if they were to continually tap a couple having "hot-chat" conversations coming out of a business trip to Paris, then we could have an issue here. If they start tapping a presidential candidate's phone calls from over seas to his campaign manager and sharing that info with his opponent, then we'd have a problem. If they start tapping calls looking for a drug smuggler, someone trying to export around tariffs or looking for politicians hiring prostitutes from Canada, then we'd have a problem. The problem is that we have no way of knowing if the call was tapped for "national security" reasons or not.
So, I agree that some oversight is needed to prevent abuse, but the FISA court was not designed to handle that. I'm sure we can agree that something needs to be designed to handle this, without compromising national security, state secrets, or individual rights.
Any conversation with anyone outside the US can be intercepted, not just the ones that originate overseas or are from known or suspected terrorist organizations. If Grandma is in London, England, or even London, Ontario, the conversation can now be legally listened to. Also, the FISA courts were set up as a rubber stamp. IIRC, there's a special room at the NSA where a federal judge does nothing but grant warrants for FISA wiretaps. The whole process takes about five minutes, and the warrant was retroactive for a few days so that nothing important would be missed. The current administration felt that this was too restrictive, so they just stopped following the law.
With disposable phones so prevalent now, how do you know which call to listen in on? This is why the gov't can't get a warrant. If you think about how it works, you will understand. Take this hypothetical:
A call comes in from Pakistan from an unknown number. It's a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC. Another call comes in from London to the same number. Another call comes in from Iran to that number. How do you know if it's tap-worthy? There's no other option but to listen in. You listen in and find out that it's just someone talking with relatives scattered all over the globe because grandma just died. No threat, so you stop listening. Do you get a warrant now because you listened in? There are thousands of calls that come in like this every single day. Most of which are harmless. Do you get a warrant for each and every one?
Yes, with proper warrants....
You don't need a warrant to tap a foreign phone. The forth does not apply overseas.
Fine. What reason then? Cite instances where the American government has wiretapped an American citizen and either explained clearly and completely why they did it, or
My standards of proof are higher than just taking mush-mouthed claims of "national security" to heart and walking away. What credible threats were investigated and what, if any, convictions (hell, what charges even) stemmed from any of the illegal wiretapping?
Sorry if you hold "national security" to such a low regard. Do you leave your doors unlocked when you go to bed? If not, I assume it's because you value YOUR security. Why then would you be so willing play fast and loose with MY security and everyone else's around you?
Sure, I'm not going to give our government unlimited power in the name of national security, but I don't really have a problem if they record a phone call coming from a cell phone in Tora Bora to a disposable phone stateside. I want them listening to every single phone call that comes from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and other hot spots around the world and I don't expect the gov't to get the thousands of warrants needed to do so. That would be impossible, especially since disposable phones make it possible to use a number once and discard of it. Do you expect the gov't to get a warrant for every call that comes in?
Since your commentary is so immature, I won't bother dignifying any response you post with further attention. I'm sure if I wanted a legitimate discussion instead of empty political theatrics, I could find it, so I don't need to bash my head on the wall with you.
You're one to talk since you keep using the phrase "illegal wiretapping". Congress has made it perfectly clear that such wiretapping is NOT illegal.
many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no good reason
Their was a reason for the spying. You may think it was good, most Slashdot members appear to believe that it was not a good reason, but a reason was given (after the fact). That reason being, they were spying on international calls believed to be involved in terrorism.
I'm not defending the ISP's or the Government, but the original post is misleading IMO.
I agree completely. I can think of 3000+ good reasons. Actually, that's not true because those 3000+ are dead and gone.
I can think of 300,000,000 reasons.
Don't get me wrong, there are valid complaints against the bill, but when you start out saying obvious lies like, "for no reason", you lose all credibility.
Besides, this seems like a money grab to me. They are trying to raise money to bribe...er... lobby congress people. If the telecom bill were THAT unpopular, these asshats in congress would be voted out, as that would be the "will of the people". Since they won't be, it's safe to assume that the American public either supports the telecom bill or simply doesn't care enough to make it a voting issue. So it seems to me that this group is trying to raise money to usurp the will of "We The People" in the name of the Constitution. Something is not right there.
Try reading the The Godwins Law FAQ
The point of Godwins Law is that once a thread degenerates into comparisons with Hitler that thread is effectively over, and can be killfiled by the participants without risk of losing any useful information.
This leads to the tradition that mention of Nazis in a thread by a participant automatically makes them lose the argument (http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/g/GodwinsLaw.html)
What if the whole point of the article is about real world Nazis? Is there no point in reading it?